Swift, Louis F., and Arthur Van Vlissingen, Reyes, Sonia, "Swift Sautes Plans to Meet Beefy Objectives,", Taylor, Lisa Y., "Old Swift Site in Fort Worth Proposed for Apartments,". In 1880, the Peninsular Car Company (subsequently purchased by American Car & Foundry) delivered to Swift the first of these units, and the Swift Refrigerator Line (SRL) was created. This radically altered the meat business. According to its own 1915 company yearbook, Swift was offering a wide variety of products, including hams, sausage, bacon, chickens, eggs, butter, lard, shortening, oleomargarine, bouillon cubes, and various soaps (including scented toilet soaps). In 1971, Swift closed down its operation there, just as, over time, it elsewhere closed many of its plants, partly because for a while it got out of the beef business and partly because the meat industry no longer had to depend on railroads for shipping its products. [7] Henry Ford states in his autobiography My Life and Work that it was a visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse which opened his eyes to the virtues of employing a moving conveyor system and fixed work stations in industrial applications. Placing the meat directly against ice resulted in discoloration and affected the taste, hence proved impractical. Over the next several years ConAgra grew into a diversified food producing and marketing giant with an array of products sold under several familiar-brand names: Healthy Choice, Butterball, Banquet, Hunt's, Orville Redenbacher's, Reddi-Whip, Slim Jim, and Armour. This, however, limits transportation to only the coldest winter months. "The House of Swift" slaughtered as many as two million cattle, four million hogs, and two million sheep a year. What is left of The Stockyards is just a small fraction of what is used to once be. Not much work unless you want to be a farmer. The largest, the Swift Meat Packing Plant, which opened in 1893, has been completely demolished; the vast majority of the former site sits underneath the approaches to the new Mississippi River bridge. Swift Meat Packing Plant - posted in Historic Buildings and Preservation: I'm looking for historical information or photos on the Swift Meat packing plant that now lays in ruins just east of the Stockyards in Fort Worth. Swift & Co. Meat Packing Plant Where's the beef now? The Swift Packing Plant was a division of Swift and Company located at South 27th and Q Streets in South Omaha, Nebraska. In 1966, Monfort reported annual sales of $85 million with a payroll of $4 million. jp2. On Tuesday, the former Swift & Co. meat packing plant on W. 65th St. finally began to meet its end as demolition crews began to carve holes into the century-old meat packing plant. Although he faced rigorous opposition from railroad officials, Swift finally got permission for use of cars on a railroad that permitted them on a roundabout route. By 1900, it had also reached beyond national boundaries, opening shops in London, England. It gradually expanded, and in 1960 opened a major meatpacking plant north of Greeley, Colorado. Verl Thompson. In response, Swift financed the initial production run on his own, then — when the American railroads refused his business — he contracted with the GTR (a railroad that derived little income from transporting live cattle) to haul them into Michigan and then eastward through Canada. Annie gave birth to eleven children, nine of whom reached adulthood. Through the period of the Union Stockyards' growth and decline, Swift & Company built plants in several other locales, including, for example, in the Stockyards District of Fort Worth, Texas. Although he was only a high school graduate, he became a very wealthy person through hard work and shrewdness. Swift and a few others helped change the system by slaughtering beef and hogs and packing their meat in Chicago before shipping it to points East. However, through most of the rest of the century, meat processing was pretty much limited to the cold winter months. It is from this position that Swift led the way in revolutionizing how meat was processed, delivered, and sold. With headquarters in Greeley, Colorado, and a 265,000 square-foot flagship processing plant in Worthington, Minnesota, Swift & Company is a leading processor of beef, pork, and lamb in both domestic and foreign markets. His father put up $20, and Gustavus was in business. Right next to the Fort Worth Stockyards is a large abandoned industrial complex that used to be the Swift Meat Packing Plant. Swift also maintains plants and other operations at facilities in other locales, notably in Iowa, Kentucky, California, and Australia. Date Created. Still, the live shipment of cattle from the stockyard was a poor system that was inimical to the cattlemen's interests. So, he hires an engineer to build a ventilated car fit specifically for our products, thereby inventing the refrigerated railcar. In 1862, Swift and his new bride opened a small butcher shop and slaughterhouse. Swift and Company, headquartered in Fort Worth, was a major branch of the nation's leading nineteenth-century meat-packing firm and one of the nation's Big Four meat-packers of the early 1900s. Two years later, it bought the remaining shares, adding Swift to a swelling list of subsidiaries that included Monfort, Inc., a Colorado beef packer, which ConAgra had also purchased in 1987, at a cost of $365.5 million. 5 votes. The upshot was that the cattle frequently commanded only low prices in the East, where the western beef was slow to gain popularity. As consumers, we often take for granted all the hard work that goes into building a great company. Three years after his death, the value of the company's capital stock topped $250 million. It was located on the South Omaha Terminal Railway, and next to the Omaha Stockyards, making Swift one of the "Big Four" packing companies in Omaha. Sausages might incorporate rat droppings, dead rodents, and sawdust, and meat that had spoiled or meat mixed with waste materials was sometimes packed and sold. During that period he was employed in several jobs, finally finding full-time work in his elder brother Noble's butcher shop at the age of fourteen. The company was founded in Chicago in the 1880s by Gustavus Franklin Swift, … Swift & Company traces it origins back to 1855 when, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 16-year-old Gustavus Franklin Swift, the ninth in a family of 22 children, encouraged by his father, started in business for himself as a slaughterer, packager, and distributor of beef. Copyright (c) 2019 Company-Histories.com. In response to the ongoing spread of coronavirus, JBS USA has established several interventions to ensure the health of our team members, the safety of our products, and our continued ability to provide our customers the highest levels of uninterrupted service. Unloading Container In order to save your overall international shipping cost, we offer containers unloading service. Despite being legally required to divest some of its sidelines, in 1920 the company still had sales exceeding $1.1 billion, and by 1922 its branch houses were still selling fresh, cured, and smoked meats, meat specialties, poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, oleomargarine, lard, shortening, cooking and salad oils, and soaps. Although ConAgra retains a large minority interest in Swift, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, in a partnership with Booth Creek Management Corporation, now hold a majority ownership in the business. Swift established himself as one of the dominant figures of "The Yards", and his distinctive delivery wagons became familiar fixtures on Chicago's streets. An astute cattle-buyer, Swift followed the market steadily westward. Note. 1915-81: Swift & Company Grows into Industry Giant. By the end of WWII meatpacking was a major industrial employer. June 7, 2019. julieannegrant. Head of Big Packing Company Dies from Internal Hemorrhages. Transgressions such as these were first documented in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, the publication of which shocked the nation and led to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. And that wasn’t the line of work Ivan “Verl” Thompson loved to do. He established Northwestern University's "School of Oratory" in memory of his daughter, Annie May Swift, who died while a student there. Swift's solution to these problems was to devise a method to ship dressed meats from his packing plant in Chicago to the East. Meanwhile, Swift saw his company grow into one of the nation's main meatpacking companies, with a reach throughout the United States. The Union Stockyards, which were established in 1865 by a group of investors, some of whom were friends of Abraham Lincoln, were processing over two million livestock by the time Swift moved to Chicago. Modernization was one key to the company's success. At its 265,000 square-foot flagship plant in Minnesota, it was slaughtering up to 16,000 hogs a day, and in the process put food safety at the top of its stringent requirements for preparing its pork for the marketplace. (Swift once bragged that his slaughterhouses had become so sophisticated that they used "everything but the squeal.") In 1999, the year in which Dennis Henley was named Swift's president and chief operating officer (COO), the company's Worthington, Minnesota, plant became its second pork producing plant to earn ISO 9002 certification--the only ones with that certification in the United States. The next year, the company bought what would eventually become its principal plant, an Armour and Company facility in Worthington, Minnesota, that it purchased from Armour's parent, the Greyhound Corporation, At the time, it was a two-story, 95,000 square-foot facility, but eventually it would almost triple in size as Swift's operations there expanded. At the beginning of the new century, Swift & Co. continued to enjoy a reputation for producing high quality products and for its innovations. Newspaper photograph of the meat packing plant. In 1998, ConAgra purchased Chicago-based Zoll Foods, a privately held processor and marketer of custom-cut pork ribs and other pork products produced for the food service industry, and made it part of Swift & Co. At the time, Zoll was logging annual sales of about $100 million. Until then, he had been working as a butcher in his brother's business, but he had bigger plans for himself and had wanted to try them out in New York City. Swift Brands Sioux City, Iowa meat packing plant circa 1917. Lake Charles (La.) Location. Chase's design proved to be a practical solution to providing temperature-controlled carriage of dressed meats, and allowed Swift & Company to ship their products all over the United States, and internationally. Fort Worth, TX. Jbs Swift & Co. Meat Packers Meat Processing. When he died in 1903, his company was valued at between US$125 million and $135 million, and had a workforce of more than 21,000. learn how over 7,000 companies got started! Jun 24, 2019 - meat packing industry truck history - Google Search St. James Press, 2003. At its new plant in Worthington, it also introduced its Swift Brands, Swift Tender Lean, and Swift Premium products. 1855-1914: From Cape Cod Butcher to Chicago Meat Packer. Swift had also diversified, branching out from beef to other meats, notably pork. The meat was packed tightly at the bottom of the car to keep the center of gravity low and to prevent the cargo from shifting. Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific railways entered the area and Edmonton’s stockyard became second in size only to Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. The company became a driving force in the Chicago meat packing industry, and was incorporated in 1885 as Swift & Co. with $300,000 in capital stock and Gustavus Swift as president. Monfort had its beginnings back in 1930, when it opened a feedlot with 30 head of cattle. For example, in 1915 Swift implemented a "safety first" campaign, reducing plant-level industrial accidents by 50 percent. That same year, the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad (O&LC) began shipping butter to Boston in purpose-built freight cars, utilizing ice to cool the contents. Klann stumbled upon the Swift Meatpacking industry—located in Chicago—which was actually a disassembly line. From Maude Reid Scrapbook 5 (MR5-308). Add Photo. Swift bought ten cars and started shipping packaged beef to eastern markets. In 1943, the company's sales volume reached $1.4 billion. Situated on 14 acres, the Swift & Company plant was adjacent to tracks of the Fort Worth Western Railroad, which carried the plant's products to the East. He bought a mature heifer, butchered it, and packaged it for sale to his neighbors. Among other things, in 1996 it expanded distribution of its line of Armour Premium branded, case-ready pork products. By 1890, the figure had grown to nine million, and the city had been transformed into the largest hog and beef holding pen in the country. The impact of the deal on Swift was not immediately clear. Seven years later Gustavus and Annie moved the family to Brighton (near Boston), where in 1872 Swift became partner in a new venture, Hathaway and Swift. To keep Model T production up with demand, Ford engineers borrowed ideas from other industries. [1], Swift donated large sums of money to such institutions as the University of Chicago, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and YMCA. Chicago and the birth of the meat-packing industry, General American Transportation Corporation, "Gustavus F. Swift Dead. [6], The meat packing plants of Chicago were among the first to utilize assembly line (or in this case, disassembly-line) production techniques. Swift also supplies other meat processors and the food-service industry with beef and raw pork for such products as bacon, sausage, and ham; it also offers several state-of-the-art product and information systems. Low-grade meats were canned in products like pork and beans. He and his family are interred in a mausoleum in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.[1]. View Gallery. Following the end of the American Civil War, Chicago emerged as a major railway center, making it an ideal point for the distribution of livestock raised on the Great Plains to Eastern markets. His parents were descendants of British settlers who went to New England in the 17th century. Cooking the meat beyond the USDA guideline of 160 degrees F renders out the fat and tenderizes the meat. [citation needed], Swift adapted the methods of the industrial revolution to meat packing operations, which resulted in huge efficiency by allowing his plants to produce on a massive scale. It was part of Gustavus Swift’s family of companies and was in operation from about 1902 to 1971. ConAgra, the parent company, traced its own history back to 1919, when, in Grand Island, Nebraska, it started out as Nebraska Consolidated Mills. As a young boy, Swift took little interest in his studies and left the nearby country school after eight years. WLKY News Louisville 3,698 views. The absence of federal inspection led to abuses. By 1968, its feedlot in North Greeley grew to process 100,000 cattle, the first single feedlot in the nation to reach that figure. 1940s SWIFT & COMPANY MEAT PACKING MARKETING FILM SUPPLY & DEMAND CARTOON 53854 - Duration: ... New complaints filed against JBS Swift meat plant - Duration: 2:49. Sometime in 1913 they realized that the "disassembly line" principle employed in slaughterhouses could be adapted to building automobiles -- on a moving assembly line. New England in the 17th century 1966, swift meat packing reported annual sales $... 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